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This is the complete list of articles from Cinema Scope issue 50. * Articles available online Features and Interviews *Film Criticism After Film Criticism: The J. Hoberman Affair by Mark Peranson *The Animal Equation by Denis Côté small roads, 103 minutes, 47 shots, 2011 by James Benning *Epinephrine, Man: The Cranked-Up Films of Neveldine/Taylor by [...]More →

By Mark Peranson In a subconscious sense, the impassioned cris de coeur that rippled through the internet following the shocking, but not surprising, dismissal of J. Hoberman from his position as senior film critic for the Village Voice on January 4, 2012, are evidence of an anxiety that springs from the changing nature of the [...]More →

By Chuck Stephens Every film Bruce Baillie makes is a folk song he’s hearing in his head. The exquisite Valentin de las Sierras, Baillie’s ten-minute 1967 masterpiece—one of a series of extraordinary films (Quixote, 1965; Castro Street, 1966; Quick Billy, 1970) he made during the ‘60s—is structured around a well-known Mexican corrido about a man [...]More →

By Albert Serra For China, Zhao Liang is the poet of justice. All his works deal, directly or indirectly, with this topic with a distinctive gentleness. The demagogic, the obvious, and the commonplace don’t exist for him. Be it through the use of violence (the pieces of human flesh of the woman run over by [...]More →

By Chris Fujiwara If there is a science-fiction element in Wang Bing’s work, an attempt to imagine unimaginable (though real) conditions for human life, there is also a war-movie element, a working-over of the terrain, together with the becoming-mineral of humanity that recalls the hard-bitten, antiheroic sagas of Samuel Fuller, Anthony Mann, and Miklós Janscó. [...]More →

By Mark Peranson “The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.”—A.F. Bell, Portugal (1912), by [...]More →

By Raya Martin There is much to be said about Carlos Reygadas—the way he shoots his lifeless sex scenes as class discourse, or the way he embraces his characters as milieus, and vice versa—but his greatest weapon is not his ability to achieve technical prowess with a relatively limited budget, nor his tributes to a [...]More →

By Jason McBride I’ve seen each of Kelly Reichardt’s feature films at least twice, but for some reason I can never really remember how they end. This despite the fact that they all end in roughly the same way: which is sort of not ending at all, with characters still in motion, heading somewhere, anywhere, [...]More →

By Antoine Thirion Discovering Raya Martin’s work inevitably went hand in hand with questions about his age. People were impressed that such a young director (he was born in Manila in 1984) hadn’t used short films as a simple springboard for features, but dared to lay the foundations for several trilogies: one about cinema (Now [...]More →

By Shelly Kraicer Pema Tseden himself considers it sad that only now, after one hundred years of cinema history, the first Tibetan filmmaker has emerged. But the first is already a master, with three brilliant features to date. Known also in Chinese as Wanma Caidan, Pema Tseden was born in 1969 in the Tibetan ethnic [...]More →

By Christoph Huber Long mainstream-despised as a videogame hack—although his case has been adopted by a handful of highbrow critics—Brit-born Paul W.S. is the elder, least pretentious, and most consistently amusing Anderson of the current director trifecta: its termite artisan. With the homegrown Newcastle juvenile-delinquent story Shopping (1994), he delivered a stylish calling card and [...]More →

By Adam Nayman Two men on fire: the burnt cranium of the title character in Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s new Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance unmistakably evokes the climax of their earlier Crank: High Voltage (2009). The spectacle of a brainpan in flames is an apt avatar for a directing duo whose M.O. is [...]More →

By Genevieve Yue The first film Michael Robinson made, at age 11, was a home-movie remake of Poltergeist, later repurposed into Carol Anne Is Dead (1992/2008). In both, Robinson’s sister presses her palms to the glass of a television monitor, its screen glowing with static. It’s a fitting image for Robinson’s pop distortions, indicating the [...]More →